Regardless of your emotional response to the election results, the question on your mind now is, "Now what?". Will student loan programs be axed? Will some be saved? The door is wide open to possibilities, but lets start with what the new President can and can't do. There are issues that are within . . . Read More

On March 10, 2015, President Obama introduced the Student Aid Bill of Rights; another executive action to deal with student loan debt. Read the official Memorandum.
Let's take a look at some of the details.
State-of-the-Art Complaint and Feedback System
The President is requesting a "simple . . . Read More

Dealing with Federal loans means understanding industrial acronyms. But what do you do when the same acronym means different things - or multiple acronyms mean almost the same thing. Does a letter really make a difference? You bet it does!
Today we'll discuss income driven plans - repayment based . . . Read More

IBR, ICR, and PAYE – the income driven repayment plans:
These three plans, Income Based Repayment (IBR), Income Contingent Repayment (ICR), and Pay As You Earn (PAYE), are all based on your income. That means low income earners, or those on social security, can qualify for an exceptionally low . . . Read More

This past weekend, I attended the Consumer Rights Litigation Conference put on by the National Consumer Law Center (NCLC). The opening speech was by Deputy Treasury Secretary Sarah Bloom Raskin. It was a fabulous speech about my favorite topic - student loans. Understand that the NCLC conference . . . Read More

Senator Warren’s bill failed to gain enough support to move on from the Senate. Now that it's dead, let me tell you why I’m glad for that.
This bill is a bad idea. It does little to help already struggling borrowers, and hurts more than most folks realize. Further, with President Obama’s recent . . . Read More

On June 9, 2014, President Obama took action to make college more affordable. Can we call this what it really it is? It’s an act to make student loans more affordable. This act in no way makes college any more affordable than it already isn’t.
What the President did was expand a program he . . . Read More

Yesterday, Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) introduced legislation aimed to help level the playing field for student loan borrowers. The main goal is to lower interest rates on ALL student loans (Fed and Private) to a fixed amount for the duration of the loan term. The theory being that if interest . . . Read More

VinothChandar / Foter / CC BYNow that the government is shut down, there is a great concern about how this affects collections of student loans, default or not. We first need to clarify that the shutdown only affects government agencies. Guarantee agencies like ECMC, Great Lakes, etc. are not . . . Read More

I was trying to find a witting opening, but all I could come up with for a reference was Mustang Sally. It's not on target, but some of the lyrics could be made relevant, "All you want to do is ride around Sally, ride, Sally, ride."
What's that? Sallie Mae is riding around? Well yes, if we . . . Read More